Clinton offers her plan for defeating Islamic State

Hillary Clinton on Thursday offered an expansive foreign-policy response to last week’s Paris terror attacks – a strategy for countering ISIL and “radical jihadism” across the globe that represents an intensification of President Obama’s current approach – but not a major break.

At a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan, Clinton outlined her vision for how America needs to lead the fight to defeat ISIL in Syria and Iraq, as well as how to fight a growing terrorist infrastructure. She also addressed how to harden America’s defenses against threats at home and abroad.

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“It’s time to begin a new phase to intensify and broaden our efforts, to smash the would-be caliphate and deny ISIS control of territory in Iraq and Syria,” Clinton said. “That starts with a more effective coalition air campaign, with more allied planes, more strikes and a broader target set.”

She said that air campaign was “necessary but not sufficient.” To be successful, she added, “airstrikes will have to be combined with ground forces actually taking back more territory from ISIS.” But she said she opposes another deployment of American troops in combat in the Middle East. “That is just not the smart move to make here,” she said. “Local people and nations have to secure their own communities. We can help them and we should, but we cannot substitute for them.”

She called for deploying a special operations force that Obama has authorizedand said she is“prepared to deploy more as more Syrians get into the fight.”

Clinton also challenged Turkey to step up and become full partners in combating ISIL. “This is their fight, and they need to act like it,” she said. “So far, however, Turkey has been more focused on the Kurds than on countering ISIS.”

And she specified how she would run a no-fly zone in Syria, saying it would be “principally over northern Syria close to the border, cutting off the supply lines, trying to provide some safe refuges for refugees ... creating a safe space away from the barrel bombs. I would certainly expect to work with the Russians to be able to do that.

“This is a time for American leadership. No other country can rally the world to defeat ISIS. Only the United States can mobilize common action on a global scale,” she said. “The entire world must be part of this fight, but we must lead it.”

The balancing act for Clinton remains how to position herself in relation to Obama, who last week, just hours before the coordinated attacks across the City of Light, said the Islamic State in Iraq had been geographically “contained.” Clinton is seen as the most hawkish Democrat in the 2016 race but also the only candidate who can be directly connected with helping put together Obama’s ISIL containment strategy as secretary of state.

“We have to look at ISIS as the leading threat of an international terror network,” Clinton said at the second Democratic debate last Saturday. “It cannot be contained; it must be defeated.”

In a Q&A following her speech, journalist Fareed Zakaria pushed Clinton to draw contrasts with her foreign policy vision and that of Obama, but she did not take the bait. She called her proposals “in many ways an intensification and acceleration” of Obama’s current strategy to defeat ISIL.

When asked if Obama underestimated ISIL when he referred to the organization as the “JV team,” Clinton said he might have been right at the time but there was no use relitigating the past. “From the perspective of what they had accomplished at that time ... the major focus of our government was on trying to remove [Syrian leader Bashar] Assad from power,” she said. “There’s been an evolution in their threat.”

And she denied that the Paris attacks have complicated her relationship with Obama. “I have made clear that I have differences, as any two people do,” she said. When she was secretary of state, she said, “we widely agreed on what needed to be done ... but even when I was still there, I thought we needed to do more earlier to try and identify indigenous Syrian fighters. ... We could have done more to help them in their fight against Assad.”

In a competing foreign policy address Wednesday, Republican candidate Jeb Bush called for more troops on the ground in the Middle East, but was vague about the details. "This is the war of our time," he said. "Radical Islamic terrorists have declared war on the Western world. Their aim is our total destruction. We can't withdraw from this threat, or negotiate with it. We have but one choice: to defeat it."

In her remarks Thursday, Clinton pushed back against calling the fight a war against a religion.

“Let’s be clear, though: Islam itself is not our adversary,” she said. “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. The obsession in some quarters with a ‘clash of civilizations’ or repeating the specific words ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ is not just a distraction, it gives these criminals, these murderers, more standing than they deserve and it actually plays into their hands by alienating partners we need by our side.”

The former secretary of state has for the most part steered clear of discussing foreign policy on the campaign trail. Her last detailed address of global issues was in September, when she offered up a policy defense of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran at a speech at the Brookings Institution.

The setup Thursday morning was similar to that address — an intimate, wood-paneled room with a podium and two leather-backed chairs set up for a question-and-answer session. The front row was reserved for local elected officials like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who only recently endorsed Clinton’s campaign, and former Mayor David Dinkins, as well as longtime allies like Vernon Jordan and former Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides.